8 Great Free SEO Tools To Help You With Your Online Website Visibilty

Most everybody these days say they want to increase the website visibility using SEO strategies, though starting from scratch is a large task, and not an easy one at that.  So if you’re working to learn SEO and don’t know what tools are available to help, we’ve compiled a list of what we think are the best free SEO tools to get the job done. The more tools you have in your SEO toolbelt, the better the results you’ll receive are. This list is broken down by function so if you’re looking for a tool to do a certain job in particular, scroll down.

Rank Checking – Rank Checker from SEOBookhttp://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

This tool once installed allows you to quickly track your keyword rankings on your own computer. It’s very quick and easy to use and even gives you the page ranking for the keyword. It checks all three major search engines and you can even save preset keyword lists to track historical rankings. You can schedule the tool to run and export your rankings data in a CSV file. It does run the search locally on your computer so you’re probably going to see some personalization but for free can you really complain?

Checking 301 Redirects – Header Checker from WeBuildPageshttp://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/header-checker/

This tool does exactly what it’s meant to – check the header of a page and return the HTTP status code to make sure it is correct. We see a lot of websites that return false 404 pages (pages that say no page found but are actually returning a 200 status code) as well as redirects which are 302 instead of permanent 301. Make sure you check a 404 page to make sure that it is actually returning a 404 status code and all your redirects to see if they are returning proper 301 status codes and to the correct final destination.

Broken Links- Xenu Link Sleuthhttp://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Xenu’s Link Sleuth has one of the strangest web pages you’ll ever visit but this tool gets the job done. It has one function and it does it well. You put in your URL and let the tool crawl your entire page for redirects, broken links, and other miscellaneous problems. When it’s complete, make sure you export the results to get a complete breakdown of 404 and redirected pages and a list of what pages are linking to them.

Keyword Research: Google Adwords Tool
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Google Adwords Tool is created by Google and uses their data to let you know what users are searching for through the Global Monthly Searches and Local Monthly Searches columns as well as let you find out about new keyword opportunities you wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I highly recommend that you switch the Match Type to [exact] so that the numbers you’re seeing are exact matches of the terms in the Keywords column and not phrases involving them and synonyms. You can set inclusion terms and exclusion terms to really find a set of keywords that fit your website. All of this data is exportable and great for presentations to potential clients.

Competitive Analysis: SEMRush
http://www.semrush.com/

SEMRush is primarily a paid search tool but you can still grab some keywords out of the free version to help with your keyword targeting efforts. You can enter in a domain name, a keyword, or a URL and you’ll show a ton of data about organic keywords, paid keywords, ad texts, competitors, and more. Since they really want you to buy their paid version, they only show you 10 entries from each of these groups. You can try putting in specific URLs that you have identified your competitors as using as a landing page to get some additional keyword ideas from the tool.

Duplicate Content: CopyScapehttp://www.copyscape.com/

This tool is great to check if anyone is stealing or scraping content of your website. If you find that someone is stealing your content, consider filing a DMCA request to have it taken down.

Toolbars: Mozbar from SEOMozhttp://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

The MozBar is great for showing you quick SEO metrics as you’re surfing the web. I really like the “Analyze” tool from MozBar which quickly lets you check all of the link metrics for a particular page and domain as well as see all of the page elements such as title, meta description, meta keywords, header tags, bolds, italics, and alt text. You can quickly check for any errors with these elements with the click of a button instead of going through the code itself. I also think that Page Authority and Domain Authority from SEOMoz are the best metrics to judge how authoritative a page is.

Backlink Analysis: Link Diagnosis
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

Link Diagnosis is a very easy to use free solution for checking out the backlink profile of a website. It uses Yahoo Site Explorer data for the URLs, which isn’t the best (I prefer Open Site Explorer which isn’t free), but you can still learn a lot from this tool. It breaks down the pages indexed and the number of links pointing to each of these URLs and the most popular anchors being used on the website. All of this data can be exported to CSV file for keeping track of new links or links that may have been removed.
That’s a great start for helping people dive in to learning SEO with some of thebest free SEO tools available today.  Hope that you learned something from the post and now you have some tools to play around with. Did we miss anything? Do you know of a tool that you think is better than one of the ones listed above? We would love to hear your feedback! Let us know about it in the comment section and we’ll edit our list to include that one as well. If you need help or have a question about any of the above tools, don’t hesitate to contact us! Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share this post with your friends.

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